MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD:

What would you do if right before you’re about to get married, your soon to be spouse tells you their darkest biggest secret. Would you call off the wedding? Would you be able to get past their past?

The new movie The Drama starring Zendaya as Emma and Robert Pattinson as Charlie, features a happily engaged couple getting ready for their big wedding in a week. While having dinner with their maid of honor and best man, a big question circulates. “What is the worst thing you have ever done?”. 

All four of them share their stories consisting of: the best man, Mike, using an ex-girlfriend as a human shield during a dog attack; the maid of honor, Rachel, locking her “slow” childhood neighbor in an abandoned trailer overnight; and Charlie, the groom, cyberbullied a classmate so severely that his family moved away.

When it comes down to the bride’s turn, the whole conversation takes a dark twist. Emma hesitantly reveals that when she was fifteen, she planned to commit a school shooting. The shock of that story in particular angers Rachel, leading her and her husband to leave the restaurant. 

Later while pressed more by Charlie, Emma reveals that she planned the shooting when she was severely depressed and being bullied at school. She said she abandoned the plan after seeing how another mass shooting near her affected her community; as a result, she started joining communities surrounding anti gun violence and advocating for gun control.

If you were in Charlie’s shoes and heard this news about your soon to be bride, what would you do (and hopefully it is NOT what he does in the movie)? 

What I personally like about this movie is that it raises very real questions. Maybe a school shooting scenario is going to the extreme, but a situation along the lines of doing something you aren’t proud of and people finding out is something that happens in everyone’s life.

Think about what the worst thing  you have ever done is. Would you share at that dinner table with your friends? Do you think people would change their opinion about you? 

Now let’s talk about some of the controversies surrounding this movie. Many people who have watched this movie think that it is glorifying school shooting in many ways. People even say it “humanizes” school shooters and “normalizes school shootings”. 

Mia Tretta, a gun violence survivor states “Hollywood is treating school shootings like ‘edgy twists’ to drive ticket sales, but for me, this isn’t a plot point… Using a planned massacre as a rom-com hook isn’t ‘starting a conversation,’ it’s exploiting a crisis. There are ways to show nuance without using trauma as a gimmick. Studios and stars have massive platforms and they should use them to give dimension to survivors, not perpetrators.”

Other people are coming to the movie’s defense saying “art is art, it’s meant to be controversial”. 

March for Our Lives said it hopes the film does spark conversation. “But,” the organization wrote in its Instagram post, “when something like a school shooting is treated lightly or played for irony, it raises a deeper question: what kind of conversation is this meant to start?” 

This movie brings up deep questions about the people around us and about big issues going on in today’s world. But the real question is, are school shootings or other large tragic events really something you can add to the plot of a movie? Is it ethical to use real life tragic events to make profit and an “edgy story” on. 

Not only did the story in the movie itself  raise questions on a “what would you do” scenario. But it raised the question of, “was this really necessary?”.